In Our Digits There Is Intelligence - October 22, 2025

Dear Friends and Backers,

As AI continues it’s quest for world domination, we at Signe Baumane Studio raise a small flag of resistance by working with our hands on the animated feature film Karmic Knot - handcrafting background sets, animating pencil-on-paper and even pencil-shading the animation, doing what AI will never be able to do: foster human creativity and problem-solving skills through the connection of our hands and fingers to our beautiful human brains. 

Here is some of our handiwork of the past few months:

This Hallway features 9 doors, all of which will open in stop motion. Sturgis builds the sets out of wood then hands them over to the Art Assistants.

We cover most sets in paper-mache to create texture and hide the grain of the wood.

The Hallway in paper-mache.

Julia Mukai, a graduate in animation of Pratt Institute, sometimes uses different techniques to texture sets.

Julia covered the walls of this set with a combination of wood glue, plaster, and food dye, with the help of a hair dryer and infra-red heater. The set is Police Headquarters and Local Jail. Our sets try to evoke a place with its own history, a lived space that reflects the state of mind of a character.

Maya Bond painting rolls of fabric - actually fashioned from rolls of cashier-register paper - for a future set. Maya worked for us this summer and is now in her final year in animation at Pratt Institute.

Julia mixing colors to paint the doors of the hallway set.

Once we get a set under lights, Signe puts on the finishing touches.

All the furniture and props for each set are also handmade.

This is what the camera sees from the previous photo. We use Dragonframe, a program to help control the camera and better see what it is seeing.

The Dive Bar with textured walls, a favorite set of ours.

The Dog-Seller set. The portrait of the dog was painted by Maya. The floor was created with wood stains by Yasemin Orhan for My Love Affair With Marriage, Signe’s previous animated feature. You couldn’t really see her work the way we shot the set back then, so we decided to re-use her floor for Karmic Knot.

The Toilet, our smallest set to date.

This set is based on the old-time medical theaters. In the film, a student gives a presentation to a very important professor seated high above in the middle gold chair. Maya created the posters on the wall.

Signe animating. She is animating most of the film herself.

The pencil shadings to Signe’s animation give the characters dimension and fits them better within the photos of the background sets. The paper is actually white, not grey.

Avery Vang, a graduate in animation at Pratt Institute, is one of our pencil-shading artists. Avery shades for 8 hours a day, as do the other shading artists.

Nicole Altan, our newest shading artist, is a graduate of Film, Animation and Video at Rhode Island School of Design. Nicole’s film Anklebones recently won the Best Student Animation Award at Ottawa International Animation Festival.

Rachel Lee was a shading artist for us this past summer. She is now in her final year in animation at Pratt Institute.

Anete Matvejeva, our Coloring Art Director, leads the coloring team in Latvia where digital work takes over the process from the hand crafted. Anete has been visiting us in New York while working remotely with her Team.

We have been pleasantly surprised at how many animation students and graduates want to work with their hands. Maybe it is the resistance to our digital age, or perhaps it’s the realization that intelligence begins in our hands and digits.

Thank you for all your love and support!

Love, Signe, Sturgis and the Karmic Knot Team

www.KarmicKnotMovie.com

To Donate to Karmic Knot: 

www.KarmicKnotMovie.com/support